Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
Why is the Valley still seething, forlorn, as it were, I asked my friend. Sulking under the impact of the week-long state imposed curfew, followed by unaccustomed sullenness, after the hanging of the Parliament House bombing attack accused Afzal Guru, the valley, ten days after the hanging at Asia’s largest jail, New Delhi’s Tihar. What did I expect the population to do; “we were not allowed to stir out of our houses for eight days; there were no newspapers, no TV, no social meetings, even kids refused to go anywhere near the e-gadgets; newspapers, the local ones, may be back now but it is doom and gloom all over again clashes and confrontation; exhortations to enthuse the angry, young and old alike.
Such Kashmiri sullenness is frankly not unusual not for me, one who has been a witness to the ever unfolding Kashmiri story in the Valley . It began at the time of the birth of India and Pakistan when Pakistani raiders invaded the State; it was there soon after that , when the popular leader of Jammu & Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah was dismissed as Prime Minister of the State, restored to power many, many years later only to see his son and son-in-law fritter away whatever remained of the old Sher-e-Kashmir’s legend. Ghulam Mohammed Shah , manipulated the ouster of his brother-in-law Farooq ushering in “Gula-curfew” as a weapon to put down dissent. The elections of the 80s of the last century proved to be the last straw on the valley’s back and with that began the insurgency which has since turned into Pakistan sponsored terrorism.
The State of Jammu and Kashmir has hobbled from one crisis to another with neither the Central Government nor the State Government proving equal to the task. The first phase of post -independence violence saw the pro Pakistani separatists owning up their first “shaheed” ( martyr) in maqbool Butt of the JKLF , who was, like Afzal Guru, sentenced to death and hanged in Tihar jail some two decades ago.
It would not be wholly right to say that no effort was made in between to sort out the Kashmir tangle with Pakistan and the two major separatists outfits in the valley involved. Domestically, any number of committees and commissions including the last one, a three member team of interlocutors was appointed without a tangible outcome.
There were political level discussions going back to the time of say, Sheikh Abdullah, and Nehru, MirzaAfzal baig and G. Parthasarathy et al, climaxed significantly at the highest political level between Prime Minister AtalBehari Vajpayee and President Gen Musharraf , all but signed a deal. Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto gave it a try too, in the 70s after the Bangladesh war but without success , thanks to the duplicity of the ever clever Bhutto. The next bet to resolve the tangle though was what Musharaf and Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh had very clearly agreed to.
The bilateral Indo-Pak dimension notwithstanding, the fact is that India had clearly lacked the foresight to stage a turnaround in it’s own relationship with Jammu and Kashmir.
It’s task need not have been as difficult as it has been made out to be. Musharaf had more than indicated the path when he spoke of the three distinct geographical and demographical regions constituting the former princely State of Jammu and Kashmir by themselves offering a key to the solution. The formation of three autonomous regions , united by a super legislature, was the key which would hold the State together , making the borders dividing India and Pakistan “irrelevant”.
Yes, it may have sounded impracticable to some, but this was a line which could have been pursued . We do have on the Kashmir statute book, a duly passed autonomy resolution of the Jammu and Kashmir assembly suggesting a different version of similar autonomy.
Even that may have provided a starting point rather than going through meaningless processes like appointing interlocutors to bring together various perceptions, an effort which has traditionally been foredoomed in Kashmir . Nor truly has any attempt ever been made to bring the mass of Kashmiri intelligentsia on board in the formulation of any other workable formula.
The State Government which has been in power in Jammu and Kashmir these six decades and more have largely proved to be ineffective, two or three exceptions not withstanding. The Center has been equally inept in doing the right thing at the right moment historically; it has indeed added to the problem faced by the state on many occasions.
Take the case of Afzal Guru’s hanging. I have spent the last fortnight trying to decipher what exactly could it have been that prevented New Delhi and Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde in particular , from informing the State Chief Minister about the hanging of Guru, before the time they chose to? Why did he think that less than a day’s notice was sufficient for the Chief Minister to take charge of the most volatile situation likely to emerge after the hanging. What prevented Shinde from informing Guru’s wife of his hanging.
Even old Bombay films of the 40s, 50s vintage showed you prison wardens asking death row inmates of any last wish(es) .
I am not surprised by the sense of outrage voiced by eminent jurist Fali Nariman over this act of negligence on the part of the Government . And why were his prison belongings not handed over to Guru’s family?
Given the style of our Home Minister you can be sure that he will inform us one of these days that the parcel containing the belongings have been mailed to Gurus house in Baramullah .
It is heartless moves like this that make martyrs out of men like Yaseen Malik who apparently was in Pakistan to see his Pakistani in-laws and daughter the day Guru was hanged; he chose to stage a roadside hunger strike , which not surprisingly, attracted the presence of the Lakshar founder Hafez Saeed among others. The Srinagar politician was questioned by media channels how he could have allowed a known terrorist like Saeed to speak from the same platform. Unfazed, the “original” Kashmiri terrorist reminded his questioners that he was one who had kidnapped the daughter of the then Indian Home Minister ( later Kashmir’s Chief Minister) in the 90s, and that he had since turned a Gandhian , with hunger strike his weapon.
Be that as it may, the post hanging situation in Kashmir has again exposed the State Government’s inability to stand up to the basic administrative challenges . Extended curfews can only add up to the divide and the state of mistrust between the people and their so called popular leaders. Omar, the Chief Minister , believes that he has served the cause well by staying on in Srinagar rather than the winter capital of Jammu. I, for one, wonder what purpose he served by planting himself at his well-secured bunglow. The Government offices, schools, colleges, and even banks, I know were closed for the week of curfew. Between him and his Home Minister, the two of them have not covered themselves in glory during the present crisis.
For the rest, it’s back to square one. It may not be long before we have another set of negotiators, interlocutors etal. No one in Delhi or Srinagar has the time to work out a lasting agreement in Kashmir. None of the national political parties seem to have the will or the strength to strike a deal with the people of the State.
The mainstream parties in the state could help work out a solution acceptable to all but who will, in the first place, bring them to a common platform.
Perhaps the growing empowerment of the Taliban and their ilk in Pakistan and Afghanistan could help persuade the Valley to find a modus vivendi with the other parts of the State as well as the rest of the Union. I cant imagine the Muslims of the State living in peace with the Taliban.
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